Do I need to intervene?

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Hazem

New Bee
Joined
Jun 3, 2009
Messages
28
Reaction score
0
Location
London, uk
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
9
Hi,

I took possession of a double brood colony yesterday. Moved it 25 miles and put in its new place. I knew that it had not been managed or inspected for the last few weeks (may be 3 to 4 weeks). Went about an hour ago and saw lots of bee out flying getting orientated and other flying randomly all over the place near and around the hive.

A quick inspection revealed the following:
- Most of the upper brood is used as store and some started getting capped.
- Few capped brood.
- Fully shaped sealed queen cells (may be 7, possibly more), mainly in the centre frames.
- Bottom brood box contained lot of capped brood and stores.
- Several queen cells (one in particular was at the bottom of one frame fully surrounded be workers).
No eggs, larvae and could see the queen (did look hard)

I assumed that the damaged has been done and they already swarmed with the original queen few days ago and new queens are about to emerge.

Do I need to intervene in any way, or leave them and check again in, say, 10 days time. How to make use of all those queen cells? (I will ask this in more details in another section of the forum).

Thanks,

Hazem
 
Hi
I would probaly do a artificial swarm ASAP

Grub
 
Your post a little confusing about the queen, did you see a queen or not?

I wouldnt AS if I didnt see a queen.

Are the queen cells capped?

Was the original queen marked? - can the previous owner give you more info?
 
Your post a little confusing about the queen, did you see a queen or not?

I wouldnt AS if I didnt see a queen.

Are the queen cells capped?

Was the original queen marked? - can the previous owner give you more info?
said he saw the queen

Grub
 
Sorry about the confusion. I did not see the queen, and I presumed she is not there because I could not see any eggs or even uncapped brood.

Thanks
 
If I have understood this post then ....
No eggs
No uncapped brood
No queen

Multiple queen cells
No other hive / colony from which to take a test frame of eggs

Recommendation:
a) if you have spare equipment take at least one of the frames with queen cells on it, another coiple of frames including stores, make up a nuc and leave both it and the main hive to do it's thing. Double your chances of getting a queen

b) no spare kit, close it up and hope you get a queen out of all those cells (but its a double brood box? yes?)

If you can take a nuc and you are double lucky consider whether to recombine and possibly get a honey harvest or accept the increase and forgo some honey.
 
Last edited:
if it's on double brood, you could perhaps split it, leaving some Q/C in each half, and maybe get 2 colonies from this situation?
 
I think perhaps you should have assessed the hive before the move.
But as you are in the situation now as with rusti make up nucs and see what queens you get.
 
splitting the brood and bees into the two box's on two floors etc. would probably be a good idea on the anti swarm cast front too
 

Latest posts

Back
Top